


Gallifrey Remembered

by offtheball



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-27
Updated: 2013-11-27
Packaged: 2018-01-02 17:19:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/offtheball/pseuds/offtheball
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Gallifrey saved, the Doctor must find his long-lost home. Little does he know, it's further away than he thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gallifrey Remembered

What a day. The Doctor leaned against the railing of the TARDIS console room and took a deep, shuddering breath. He thought about landing, but where? What in this Universe would do?

Rose. Standing on that beach, crying. The image wouldn’t fade from his mind as quickly as she had from before him. Then there’d been the Racnoss. God, what a day.

If only Donna had come with him. Perhaps the distraction would keep her from his mind. But, like so many before her, she’d made the wise decision to go back to her life. She’d just made it sooner than most.

He moved forward and ran his hand along the console. She was humming contentedly. He often wondered what she knew. She was sentient, of course, but did she sense his hearts breaking? Did she care? In flight, she had all of time and space. Even the last of the Time Lords must seem incredibly small.

So, he left the console room. He tried to go to bed, but he couldn’t sleep. The humming seemed deafening to him. He turned from one side to the other, but nothing worked. He’d gotten too used to having her there, in the next room, just down the hall and miles from himself. As much as he’d always wanted her right there with him, he didn’t realise how comforting it was to have even the faintest glimmer of that potential there for him until this night.

Finally, he pushed himself out of bed. He left his room and wandered the halls, lost in the way he never could be in this place. He passed the library, and the pool, and that frozen conflict from Argoras VII he’d never got around to ending. Eventually, he turned into a storage room.

He had no idea how many there were. Dozens that he knew of. Millions, perhaps, locked in potentia, where things would one day go. Past and future were more abstract in this place than most.

This one, however, was unique. Each one was different. The earliest were comfortable, like a home. They held memories of Susan, her childhood toys, books he used to read her, trophies from their adventures. They got rather sterile for a while after that, back when the TARDIS was more machine to him than home. There was that one with the multi-coloured translucent walls filled with jelly babies he loved.

This one was red, and a little too hot. It held weapons. It was the storage room from the Time War. His darkest hours were held here; his deepest regrets; his most crushing shame.

Oh, Doctor. He acted big, but in the end, he was very small. He’d run from the Time War screaming, his eyes full of fire, his body morphing almost too fast, as though it were desperate to become something else. He’d run, and he’d kept running all the way back to Earth. Back to a shop filled with homicidal plastic, and into the arms of a girl. A girl! God, how ridiculous. In his darkest moment, he, last of the Time Lords, had sought redemption in love. Now that she was gone, he was left with this.

He bent over to examine some of the smaller weapons. Knives and daggers lined the lower shelves. Further along were the particle weapons. Here and there were Daleks’ stalk eyes: trophies from battles he’d deemed far too glorious in those early days. He never placed things here. The TARDIS did that for him, archiving his entire life. She knew what mattered to him, and it made him sick.

He turned to leave when a box caught his eye. A box, of all things. He cocked his head and knelt down next to it. A few small guns; some projectile weapons; a couple of sonic grenades (his own invention); and a globe.

He pulled out the globe and sat down, crossing his legs. A globe? Where did this come from? He ran his fingers along it. It seemed to be perfectly smooth, and from the feel of it in his hands, perfectly spherical.

It showed Gallifrey. The beautiful, massive red planet. The detail was exquisite. He could make out Mount Perdition, the sprawling city of Arcadia, and, dear god, there was the Citadel, just barely noticeable.

And there was the fire. Raging all about the planet. Forests burning, cities crumbling. He could make out a dozen large explosions taking place, frozen.

She must have made it. For some reason, his TARDIS had preserved the memory of Gallifrey, as it must have been while he was flying away from it, just before the Moment activated and burned it to ash.

His face scrunched up as the tears began to flow. It was not dignified or attractive: he was blubbering. He placed the globe back in the box and kicked it under a shelf. He knew why she’d kept that memory, of course. She always knew what mattered most to him.

* * *

Arms crossed, Donna walked up to the Doctor and leaned next to him against the pylon. She’d never seen him so genuinely happy. The grin on his face hadn’t shifted in almost half an hour, and his gaze never wavered.

”Oi, Space Boy.’ She nudged him with her elbow and he turned to her, his gaze lingering for just a moment.

”It’s been a good day, Earth Girl.”

She inclined her head and smiled back at him. Part of him lived in her now. It wasn’t memories, or knowledge. It was more like intuition. That was perhaps the most remarkable thing about him. All those crazy schemes he came up with, the hair-brained solutions, were not because he knew what he needed to. He had an intuition. Intuition for alien technology, for time and space, for energy and matter and all their nearly infinite arrangements.

Enough of him survived in her to know what she meant. She felt the weight in his hearts, and the ecstatic joy she brought him. They didn’t need to talk. He knew that she knew. He simply nodded to her and turned back to Rose. She followed his gaze, and she couldn’t deny that Rose made her happy too, now. She was meant to be here, in the TARDIS, with the Doctor.

Standing across from them, hands in his pockets, frowning, was the metacrisis. The Doctor, but not the Doctor. The DonnaDoctor? She supposed he’d take a name now. He wasn’t the Doctor; more than she was, certainly, but he wasn’t the Doctor. He was something else entirely.

So she walked over to him and smiled. He looked up at her and managed a smile. “You know, I remember. Time Lord memory is a funny thing. I remember being him. But it’s getting weaker. Not disappearing, just becoming more like stories than like memories.”

She nodded. “A Time Lord’s memories are written into time itself. You’re getting further in time from that moment. You’re becoming a new man, more and more with each passing moment, and you’re losing what it is to be him.”

He sniffed. “Yeah, I know. I’m something else. What am I, if I’m not him? I’ve never known anything else.”

She smiled and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’re something else. Something new and unique in all of creation. You’re special.”

He laughed and nodded slowly. “Special. Yeah. That’s what he says to the small people.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think he’d give his right hand to be you.”

They both laughed. They were still laughing when the Doctor, the real Doctor, interrupted. “What’s so funny?”

They both shook their heads in unison and then laughed at that. The Doctor furrowed his brow and gave them a strange look. Metacrises. Odd folks.

”Listen, you,” he pointed at his doppleganger. “I need to talk to you.” He looked at Donna. “Privately.”

”Whatever that means anymore,” she said as she turned and walked off towards Rose.

They hugged, and chatted. Donna kept looking over at them. The Doctor was quite animated, though quieter than she thought he was capable of being. The DonnaDoctor kept mostly silent, nodding, running a finger over his forehead. She knew exactly who they were talking about.

God, it had to be killing him. Dimensional retroclosure. The walls of reality were rising again. She could hear the TARDIS whining as she jumped over them, navigating in these strange waters, trying to land in a universe not her own. And she knew the Doctor would never stay, but he would never leave Rose alone if he could help it. And he wasn’t ready to let go of the guilt which haunted him.

Time Lords. When you knew a Time Lord, you thought no one could be so grand. He was so much larger than life. He was massive, brilliant. But he was so much smaller on the inside.

* * *

”You know, I’m not him.”

”I know you’re not him.”

”But he’s the man you love.”

Rose reached her hand up and stroked his face. "David, I love you."

A tear rolled down his cheek. He'd been in this other world, with Rose, for three days. They'd been the best - and technically, only - three days of his life. He was lying with Rose in her bed, moonlight streaming through their window. They were naked together beneath the doona, and she'd called him Doctor in the middle of it.

"I know you're not him. You just look like him. You have his face, and for years, this has been the face of the Doctor to me." She kissed his cheek. "You just chose your name today. It takes some getting used to."

He nodded and reached for her hand. "I know. I know. I'm being silly. It's just…it's a lot to live up to, you know? I've got big shoes to fill."

She giggled and kissed his neck. "You know what they say about a man with big shoes."

"I believe that's feet."

She slapped his chest playfully. "You never told me you have a thing for feet."

He burst out laughing and rolled over, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her. She giggled and then moaned, her legs moving to either side of him as their bodies pressed together.

It would be another few weeks until he told her about the globe. The Doctor's last gift to her. It was a reminder of him: of what he'd been, what he'd done, and what she'd saved him from. Perhaps most importantly, it was a reminder of what she was to save him from. David, born from the Doctor, born in battle. He would be made whole again by this woman.

* * *

David and Rose married three years later. They had their first child another four years after that. They named her Martha.

Martha was raised on stories of the Doctor. When she was old enough to understand, she learned who her father was. She thought it was funny that he was only seven years older than her, and later, when she learned about sex, horrified.

The globe sat on the mantle above the fireplace. Martha would take it down and roll it between her hands as David told her all about how the Doctor helped to burn and rebuild Rome, the time he battled a giant brain, and that one time he snogged Madame de Pompadour.

She grew tired of the stories eventually. They were kid's stories, she said. She was a teenager now. She complained as David told her about the witches and Shakespeare, and so David took the globe from her.

"Do you know what this is?"

She shrugged. "It's a planet. It's on fire."

He nodded. "Yes, it is. Do you know what planet it is?" She shook her head. "Did I ever tell you where the Doctor came from?"

She nodded, then raised an eyebrow. "It's Gallifrey?"

"It most certainly is."

"But it's burning."

"Yes, it is." He sat back and rolled the globe in his hands. "This is what Gallifrey looked like on the last day of the Time War." She cocked her head. "I never told you about that."

He gave her back the globe. "The Time War. The war to end all wars, or it should've been. The people of Gallifrey fought the Daleks, in one final, massive battle. It should've ended it. It should've ended everything.

"When you have two races like the Gallifreyans and the Daleks, there's no limit to the destruction. The battle raged across all of time and space. The Universe was burning. The Daleks became even madder, if you can believe it, and the Time Lords became cruel. They broke every rule and crossed every line in that unending war, except one. There was one line the Time Lords would not cross. And so the Doctor did it for them."

Martha forgot most of the stories about the Doctor. She never forgot about the Time War. When she had her own son, many years later, she told him of the Time War, and why they kept the globe. Her parents gave her the globe, and she gave it to her son, William.

Their family never forgot about the Doctor. It was part of their heritage. They all knew that they came from Gallifrey, and that this was their home, as well as Earth.

* * *

Many years later, David and Rose were gone. Martha sat in a park with her wife, Julie, handing out bread to the ducks. Their granddaughter played on the slide, laughing as a child should. Neither of them noticed when a tall, grey-haired man strode into the park.

Their granddaughter ran up to the man and stared up at him.

"Where did you come from?"

He smiled down at her. "Far, far away." He looked around. "I haven't been here in a long time."

"This is the best park," she replied.

He nodded. "It looks quite lovely." Then he bent down and looked her in the eye. "What's your name?"

"I'm Susan," she said, almost proudly. She held out her hand for him to shake.

He took her hand and shook it lightly. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Susan. I'm the Doctor. I'm looking for something."

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very quick one, written as a result of a Facebook conversation about the Day of the Doctor. What if the Doctor was in possession of the frozen Gallifrey all along, but never knew what he had?
> 
> Thanks to my roommate, CJ, for the idea, and to her and Elizabeth for reading it through.


End file.
